Memories - how to change them

Yesterday was an exhilarating day for me. I met someone I have followed and listened to for the longest time, Professor Moran Cerf.

One of the most important conversations we had was about memory. How to change it more specifically. I will do my best to explain what he taught me. 

Memories reside in a part of the brain. When they need to be used, they are recalled. "Loaded" was the word he used.

Once loaded, your brain then makes sense of the memory. You would experience it as recalling or recollecting an experience.

The lovely dinner you had in Venice, for example.

Memories are stored in stacks, or categories. A category, for example, could be love. So everything that you love or that evokes the emotion of love in you is stacked in one place or location.

When you recollect memories, they are "loaded" from this stack and brought to your active memory. Here is the interesting part. 

Once loaded, whatever you do to that memory is the version that is stored back. 

So, when you remember the dinner in Venice, if you tell yourself, "You know what? The dinner was lovely, but the wine did not sit well, and I really should stop drinking."

That is the version of the memory that will be stored. 

In the beginning, it will not sound like anything has changed at all. But if you keep doing this over and over again, six times according to him, then in time, your memory will develop to start to dislike wine. 

And just like that, if you keep making the effort to recall memories and then shape them in a way that works better for you, you will alter your experience of your life. 

Remember, what you think of your life is a function of all the memories collectively that make you call what you have done on earth "life."

Here is a simple hack to alter that experience for yourself. 

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